If the right hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will make a little progress and then happily take an intervention from him.
For me, there is a simple point. This weekend, many of us will have proudly celebrated Pride. We will have seen the rainbow flag and talked about the importance of standing up for the rights of gays, lesbians and transgender people across the world. We have seen persecution in
Chechnya, and in Europe under the Orbán legislation, and we have stood up and said that we as a nation want to be a beacon. We have even said that we should kick countries out of the Commonwealth that do not uphold gay rights. There was an outcry in this country when people saw legislation introduced in Alabama under which doctors are prosecuted for performing abortions, while Georgia is saying that no woman can have an abortion later than six weeks, by which time most women do not even realise that they might be pregnant.
There is a simple rule for those of us who have been consistent—as I hope that the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) would recognise that many of us have been—whether we have fought the global gag rule, or stood up for the importance of international development investment in maternity healthcare. We cannot argue that we are beacons of human rights around the world if we do not get our own house in order. We are told consistently by the international agencies that we have signed up to that we have a problem in Northern Ireland—in particular, that we are treating women there as second-class citizens. This Bill speaks to what we do in the absence of an Assembly that is able to fulfil those international obligations. If those obligations do not mean anything, what does this place do, when sometimes it has to speak for those whose voices cannot be heard?
I was at the Council of Europe two weeks ago, when the Government were boasting about being about to ratify the Istanbul convention on violence against women, but the legislation that the Government have introduced to try to do that will not even cover Northern Ireland. The Bill before us will not deal with the gap, so women in Northern Ireland will not have protection from stalking. They do not have coercive control legislation, and will not get the support of the domestic violence commissioners, yet the Istanbul convention is a piece of international legislation that we have signed up to and committed to. We have said that it speaks to our support for human rights.
On abortion in Northern Ireland, in the years since we had an Assembly, we have been directly criticised by the United Nations. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has explicitly said that the UK cannot invoke its internal arrangements to justify its failure to revise the Northern Ireland laws that violate the convention by denying women in Northern Ireland the same rights as women in my constituency of Walthamstow or the Minister’s constituency: the right to have a safe, legal and local abortion.